Posts by JohnWDailey
In our understanding of mass extinction and adaptive radiation, we have found that life can't and doesn't bounce back right away. They take time. It took life eight to ten million years to recove...
There are two different varieties of angels"”the naked, long-distance flier and the feathered, short-distance glider (The Four-Winged Angel). But both varieties have the following anatomical featu...
This is based on the notion of adaptive radiation, a process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environm...
One of the Stack Exchange's most popular topics is remaking mythological and fantastical creatures with realistic, believable anatomy. Usually, the answers go that for an angel's anatomy to be bel...
Inside our eyes are two different kinds of receptors: The rod, in which the human eye has 120 million and work in low light The cone, in which the human eye has only 6 to 7 million of them, the r...
Though the job of breastfeeding is typically known to the women, there are documented cases of men producing breast milk. However, these reports are few and far between, which means that while men...
Background Information: 252 million years ago, Siberia erupted, releasing enough lava to fill in a volume anywhere between one and four million cubic kilometers. Any time someone thinks "large ig...
An improvement of this: A Completely Different Kind of Reef Which I couldn't delete because it already had answers, and deleting an answered question will dock me some reputation. Today's reefs ...
Giants do exist. It's just that they can't be anywhere close to being as big as those in Norse mythology or the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. The best we'd ever have for a giant was Robert Wad...
Over four and a half billion years ago, Theia, a rogue planet the size of Mars, slammed into the infant Earth. This impact is believed to have resulted in the birth of many things, from the moon t...
For this scenario, we must look at the postercard of the term "superearth"--Kepler-10b. Its mass is almost 3.5 times greater than Earth, and its diameter 1.4 times wider. Now let's imagine that...
In this more realistic scenario than typical fantasy, the vampire is just an ordinary human being with a certain genetic quirk that results in the following: A reversed circadian rhythm (active a...
At the height of the last ice age, glaciers as thick as one mile reached as far down south in Europe as London. This is the reason why England and Wales have very little mountains, and why the ter...
Five million years ago, the warm Miocene gradually descended into the cool Pliocene before dropping into the frigid Pleistocene. Such a change in temperature was so gradual that life went on withou...
In the human species, one male partner is enough for the sperm to fertilize the egg. The average cargo is just one child, half of its DNA from the mother and the other half from the father. But t...
Ordinary granite is a tough rock"”the toughest on planet Earth"”but it still cracks easily, exposing it to the wrath of erosion. But the granite that makes up the Yosemite landscape is different. ...
Long ago, I made a post with a scenario on how planet Earth would be affected if our moon were the size of Mars. But I've decided that it be more reasonable if our moon were closer in size to Tita...
Storms can devastate lives and property, but they have benefits as well--plenty of water for the plants and nitrogen for the soil. Even drought has its benefits, giving the landscape an occasional...
In this scenario, the sun is a binary star, sharing orbit with an F-type main-sequence star. The first planet from that binary star is a Jupiter-like gas giant, orbiting one-third of an AU from th...
In popular science fiction, we see habitable Earth-like planets with visible, Saturn-like rings. In reality, such rings exist only on gas giants, a category where we can find Saturn. Is it really...
In mammals - and that includes us humans - the lungs make up 7% of the total body volume. This allows us to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, thanks to the pulmonary alveoli. But bird lungs...
Earth in this scenario still rotates once every 24 hours, and the temperate zone still has four seasons, each one lasting three months. But in this scenario, a temperate summer has the sun shining...
Back home, Venus is a twin planet with serious issues. The average surface temperature is 900 degrees Fahrenheit, atmospheric pressure is 92 times greater than ours and carbon dioxide makes up 96%...
Astronomers place planet Earth under what they call a "Goldilocks Zone"--a spot in the solar system where conditions are ideal for liquid water to form, thus making the creation of life possible. ...
From my understanding of animals, lifespan is all based on the speed of its metabolic rate. As endothermic animals, mammals live a high-octane life - growing up fast, being quick on activity regard...
